Knife

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Time, NPR, Town & Country, New York Post, Chicago Public Library, Kirkus Reviews

On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man in black—black clothes, black mask—rushed down the aisle toward him, wielding a knife. His first thought: So it’s you. Here you are.

What followed was a horrific act of violence that shook the literary world and beyond. Now, for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey toward physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide.

Knife is Rushdie at the peak of his powers, writing with urgency, with gravity, with unflinching honesty. It is also a deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable, an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.“Candid, plain-spoken and gripping . . . Knife is a clarifying book. It reminds us of the threats the free world faces. It reminds us of the things worth fighting for.”—The New York Times

“Knife isn’t so much about pondering imminent death than it is an affirmation—an insistence—on returning to life.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“The subject—the idea for which Rushdie nearly died—is the freedom to say what he wants . . . Rushdie survived, but he has too many scars to be certain that the idea will. This book is his way of fighting back.”—The Atlantic

“A brave and beautiful book that tells his story with a cathartic relish, no gruesome detail spared . . . this book is as much a love letter to his wife—the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths—as it is a punch-back at his assailant.”—The Wall Street Journal

Salman Rushdie’s memoir is horrific, upsetting—and a masterpiece . . . Knife is a tour-de-force, in which the great novelist takes his brutal near-murder and spins it into a majestic essay on art, pain and love . . . full of Rushdie’s wit, his wisdom, his stoicism, his optimism, his love of all culture.”—Daily Telegraph
 
“Knife is in part about—and in some sense itself is—a battle between the two most prominent Rushdies: Great Writer and Great Man, artist and advocate, private person and public figure . . . Contains some of the most precise, chilling prose of his career.”—Vulture

“Not just a candid and fearless book but—against all odds—a defiantly witty one . . . A ‘reckoning’, if not quite a catharsis, Rushdie’s invigorating dispatch from (almost) the far side of death’s door names and limits the attack as ‘a large red ink blot.’”—The Financial Times

“Rushdie’s triumph is not to be other: despite his terrible injuries and the threat he still lives under, he remains incorrigibly himself, as passionate as ever about art and free speech.”—The Guardian

“Knife is testament to Rushdie’s convictions and to the sustaining power of love as he focuses on the suffering and support of his family and his wife, writer and artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, during this ordeal . . . every electrifying page elicits tears and awe.”—Booklist

“A graceful meditation on life and death that captures Rushdie at his most observant and lyrical.”—KirkusSalman Rushdie is the author of fifteen novels—Luka and the Fire of Life; Grimus; Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker); Shame; The Satanic Verses; Haroun and the Sea of Stories; The Moor’s Last Sigh; The Ground Beneath Her Feet; Fury; Shalimar the Clown; The Enchantress of Florence; Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights; The Golden House; Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize); and Victory City—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published five works of nonfiction—The Jaguar Smile; Imaginary Homelands; Step Across This Line; Joseph Anton; and Languages of Truth—and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.Chapter 1

Knife

At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the amphitheater in Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.

I was with Henry Reese, co-creator, along with his wife, Diane Samuels, of the City of Asylum Pittsburgh project, which offers refuge to a number of writers whose safety is at risk in their own countries. This was the story Henry and I were at Chautauqua to tell: the creation in America of safe spaces for writers from elsewhere, and my involvement in that project’s beginnings. It was scheduled as part of a week of events at the Chautauqua Institution titled “More Than Shelter: Redefining the American Home.”

We never had that conversation. As I was about to discover, on that day the amphitheater was not a safe space for me.

I can still see the moment in slow motion. My eyes follow the running man as he leaps out of the audience and approaches me, I see each step of his headlong run. I watch myself coming to my feet and turning toward him. (I continue to face him. I never turn my back on him. There are no injuries on my back.) I raise my left hand in self-defense. He plunges the knife into it.

After that there are many blows, to my neck, to my chest, to my eye, everywhere. I feel my legs give way, and I fall.


Thursday, August 11, had been my last innocent evening. Henry, Diane, and I had strolled without a care through the grounds of the Institution and had a pleasant dinner at 2 Ames, a restaurant on the corner of the green park area called Bestor Plaza. We reminisced about the talk I’d given eighteen years earlier in Pittsburgh about my part in creating the International Cities of Refuge Network. Henry and Diane were at the talk and were inspired to make Pittsburgh an asylum city, too. They began by funding one small house and sponsoring a Chinese poet, Huang Xiang, who strikingly covered the exterior walls of his new home with a poem in large white-painted Chinese letters. Gradually, Henry and Diane expanded the project until they had a whole street of asylum houses, Sampsonia Way, on the city’s North Side. I was happy to be in Chautauqua to celebrate their achievement.

What I didn’t know was that my would-be killer was already present on the grounds of the Chautauqua Institution. He had entered using a false ID, his fake name constructed out of the real names of well-known Shia Muslim extremists, and even as we walked to dinner and back again to the guesthouse where we were staying, he, too, was there somewhere, he had been there for a couple of nights, wandering around, sleeping rough, checking out the site of his intended attack, making his plan, unnoticed by any surveillance camera or security guard. We could have run into him at any moment.

I do not want to use his name in this account. My Assailant, my would-be Assassin, the Asinine man who made Assumptions about me, and with whom I had a near-lethal Assignation . . . I have found myself thinking of him, perhaps forgivably, as an Ass. However, for the purposes of this text, I will refer to him more decorously as “the A.” What I call him in the privacy of my home is my business.

This “A.” didn’t bother to inform himself about the man he had decided to kill. By his own admission, he read barely two pages of my writing and watched a couple of YouTube videos of me, and that was all he needed. From this we can deduce that, whatever the attack was about, it wasn’t about The Satanic Verses.

I will try to understand what it was about in this book.A New York Times Notable Book of the Year; National Book Award finalist